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Waves of refugees flee one home, building another here

News from Syria prompts onetime refugees here in Canada to recall their struggles.

Somali-Canadian rapper K'naan is pictured in a handout photo. K'naan has long drawn musical inspiration from his troubled homeland. Now he says he's ready to make a film about his war-torn roots. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Patrick Hoelck (HO / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Marina Nemat was imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian government as a teenager, and came to Canada in 1991 with her son and husband. She is one of eight people who came to Canada as refugees and are shining examples of good citizenry. She is now a successful author and is seen in the Bathurst and Fort York Area. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Tenzin Nordhen poses for a photograph at the Caplasnky's restaurant and deli on College Street on September 3, 2015. Nordhen, a recent immigrant to Canada, has been working at the location for five years and is currently the active manager of the restaurant. (Brian B. Bettencourt / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Mie Tha Lah is a Karen seen outside his Scarborough home on September 4, 2015. Lah was a refugee who fled Burma and lived for 13 years in a barbed wire camp in Thailand before he was allowed into Canada in 2007. He now works full-time as a social worker to help support his growing family. (Brian B. Bettencourt / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Fougere Adolphe, with his daughters Emmanuelle, 7 (left) and Karen, 4, is a refugee from Haiti and is part of the feature on eight refugees that are shining examples of good citizenry. September 4, 2015. (Bernard Weil / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Ken Do is the vice-principal at Northview Heights Secondary School in the Finch and Bathurst area. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

James Nguyen is seen in his St. Lawrence market neighbourhood where he lives. Nguyen is the former President of the Vietnamese Association of Toronto and now is the President of the Vietnamese Canadian Voting and Advocacy Association. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

The building of Canada is a ceaseless task. All manner of people have been involved in the enterprise, from the First Nations to the British and French colonizers and waves of immigrants from all over the world.

Here, as the desperate crisis of displaced people sweeps Europe and beyond, we look to a host of those who came to this country as refugees. Some fled persecution and war-torn territories; some had nowhere else to turn. All found success and happiness in Canada.

James Nguyen, community leader

James Nguyen is seen in his St. Lawrence market neighbourhood where he lives. Nguyen is the former President of the Vietnamese Association of Toronto and now is the President of the Vietnamese Canadian Voting and Advocacy Association. (Richard Lautens)

Nguyen was a little boy when he was one of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who fled by sea to a camp in Malaysia, where he lived for almost a year before coming to settle in Canada. Now 40, Nguyen recently finished his term as president of the Vietnamese Association of Toronto and is now working with a group that’s trying to sponsor refugee families displaced by the war in Syria.

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“It literally is heartbreaking. That could have been me,” said Nguyen, referring to the drowned toddler from Syria whose photo has shocked the world. “This is really near and dear to our hearts and our Vietnamese group,” he said. “We know what it’s like to struggle and to flee a repressive regime.”

Marina Nemat, writer

Marina Nemat was imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian government as a teenager, and came to Canada in 1991 with her son and husband. She is one of eight people who came to Canada as refugees and are shining examples of good citizenry. She is now a successful author and is seen in the Bathurst and Fort York Area. (Richard Lautens)

She was 16 when she was tortured in a political prison in Tehran, one of the victims of the then-fledgling Islamic regime in Iran. With a possible death sentence haunting her every move, she managed to clinch a travel visa to Spain with her husband and young son and was accepted as a refugee to Canada in 1991. Nemat, now 50 and living in Toronto, wrote the internationally bestselling memoir, Prisoner of Tehran.

“The past was so dark that I could not talk about it, the present was a hell hole and the future did not exist because I had a death sentence over my head,” she told the Star this week, urging the government and Canadians to accept more refugees.

“These people are coming from war zones. Their family members are being killed, they’re starving,” she said. “That little boy . . . I had a little boy when I left Iran. It makes me want to go jump off the CN Tower. It makes me angry to my core.”

Fougère Adolphe, immigration consultant

Fougere Adolphe, with his daughters Emmanuelle, 7 (left) and Karen, 4, is a refugee from Haiti and is part of the feature on eight refugees that are shining examples of good citizenry. September 4, 2015. (Bernard Weil)

Adolphe came to Canada in late 2007, a political refugee of the René Préval regime in Haiti. In the eight years since, he’s founded the Communauté Haitienne Unie de l’Ontario and works as a consultant to help bring refugees to Canada and — just as important in his mind — help them settle and sponsor their families.

“There are people who don’t know how to integrate; they don’t even know where to go,” he said. “The experience is very traumatizing for those immigrants.”

Tenzin Nordhen, restaurant manager

Tenzin Nordhen poses for a photograph at the Caplasnky's restaurant and deli on College Street on September 3, 2015. Nordhen, a recent immigrant to Canada, has been working at the location for five years and is currently the active manager of the restaurant. (Brian B. Bettencourt)

Nordhen was born in a country that never accepted him; his parents were displaced to India when China occupied Tibet. He and his family were considered foreigners in their adopted land. After eight years living illegally in Nepal, he hopped a flight to the U.S., lived in a church for a month and was eventually granted entry to Canada.

He met Zane Caplansky working at the Magic Oven pizza restaurant and now manages Caplansky’s Deli on College St.

“I’ve never had a bad moment in Canada so far,” said Nordhen, 35. He describes his excitement at seeing the TTC’s streetcars and embarking on a coast-to-coast road trip. “I felt Canada (was) home from the first, second week,” he said.

K’naan, musician

Somali-Canadian rapper K'naan is pictured in a handout photo. K'naan has long drawn musical inspiration from his troubled homeland. Now he says he's ready to make a film about his war-torn roots. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Patrick Hoelck (HO)

The international hip-hop sensation, whose breakout 2009 album Troubadour racked up sales and charted high in several countries, was born in Somalia. In 1991, when he was 13, he fled war-ravaged Mogadishu with his family who landed first in New York before being accepted in Toronto.

“When we’re grown, it’s easy to think of foreigners, immigrants and refugees as people who are different, separate, from the rest of us,” K’naan told the Star in 2012, upon publication of a children’s book about his experience.

“I think children can more easily understand that these people have families also, and friends they love and have to leave in difficult circumstances and that we have more in common with them than we believe we do as adults.”

Peter C. Newman, journalist

The acclaimed writer and editor was born in Austria and escaped the Nazis with his parents during the Second World War, when he was 11 years old.

The acclaimed writer and editor was born in Austria and escaped the Nazis with his parents during the Second World War, when he was 11 years old. He entered Canada as a Jewish refugee in 1940, after being baptized a Catholic as he fled Europe. He went on to an illustrious career, writing books such as Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years and When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada, and took the helm of both the Toronto Star and Maclean’s Magazine as editor-in-chief.

“We’re all boat people,” Newman declared in 1997, during a ceremony in Halifax to commemorate the refugees and immigrants who came to Canada through that port city.

“This country was put together not by bloodlines, kin or tradition, but by waves of newcomers.”

Mie Tha Lah, settlement worker

Mie Tha Lah is a Karen seen outside his Scarborough home on September 4, 2015. Lah was a refugee who fled Burma and lived for 13 years in a barbed wire camp in Thailand before he was allowed into Canada in 2007. He now works full-time as a social worker to help support his growing family. (Brian B. Bettencourt)

Born in Burma as a member of the Karen minority’s Christian community, uncertainty ruled his world from an early age. His schoolteacher father was kidnapped by rebels based in Thailand, so that he could teach Karen kids in a refugee camp. Five years later, Lah and his family were smuggled out to join him, and they spent the next 13 years in an impoverished camp penned in by barbed wire.

It wasn’t until 2007, when Canada, the U.S. and other countriesopened their doors to Karen refugees that Lah was able to move to Toronto. He now works at the Jane and Finch Community Family Centre, helping fellow Burmese refugees settle into life in the city.

“Living under uncertainty just becomes part of your lives . . . You don’t know if you are going to die or if you are going to live the next week,” he said. “You don’t know when your time has come, let alone if you are going home or when . . . The spiritual strength played a big role to survive.”

Ken Do, vice-principal

Ken Do is the vice-principal at Northview Heights Secondary School in the Finch and Bathurst area. (Richard Lautens)

He was 13 when he huddled on the Vietnamese coastline in the pouring rain in 1979, and his father told him to run for his life. Gunfire barked everywhere and Do’s extended family of 41 rushed for cover in the boat bobbing in the waves. Only 16 of them made it. They spent the next 11 days without food or water, floating in the ocean, being rocked by storms and periodically harassed by pirates.

Eventually they were marooned on a deserted island. People killed each other to survive; others died of starvation and exposure. The population of the islet swelled to more than 10,000 Vietnamese before Do and his family were granted asylum, and eventually citizenship, in Canada. He is now a vice-principal at Northview Heights Secondary School and has three daughters.

Do said the stories this week underlines the memories of his own ordeal.

“Yesterday I watched the news, showing all these refugees in Hungary. You look at the faces, the expression in their eyes. It’s out of desperation, and I can put myself back in that situation. Thirty-seven years ago we were in that same boat.”

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